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Comment by MattDemers | Hacker News Reader

Happy to see this, mostly because HomeAssistant stuff is nowhere near consumer-ready. I barely have the Docker knowledge to get it working in the first place on my NAS, and even just doing basic automations assumes you know much more coding/process stuff than the typical normie.

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> mostly because HomeAssistant stuff is nowhere near consumer-ready

I don't think that's quite accurate, normal people probably won't be able to set up complex automations, but having used Control4 and HomeAssistant's configuration tools, both are somewhat equivalent in difficulty, with C4 having a slight edge because there's a lot of hardware vendors who deeply integrate with it. A lot of the families I've done home automation for would have been able to consume HomeAssistant without any issues. There was one person who had a high end setup involving whole home video involving matrix switches that I am hesitant to make that claim for.

Important to know that most "normies" that consume home automation have a tech representative who deals with their setup.

It's not quite there yet, but with all in one devices they are creating - they're trying to make it a little easier. It's significantly better than when I first tried it like 6 years ago, and got a SmartThings hub because I needed something more stable for wife approval.

I've run into, twice in the past year, some kind of update or config change (that says valid) that made the UI inaccessible and had to quickly spin up a new VM and restore my backup.

E: many people will be better served by Alexa/Google/Apple hubs with matter integration that support everything with a polished Ui. Those with super techy inclinations - or propensities towards tinkering will want something like HA

>Important to know that most "normies" that consume home automation have a tech representative who deals with their setup.

I wouldn't have assumed that; I was more thinking the "got some Hue bulbs for Christmas and someone pointed them to HA" kind of thing. Thanks for pointing it out.

I don't think it has to be anyway. When it becomes too consumer-focused, the value-add for us techies is lost. Because mainstreaming invariably comes with reduced power user features. Home Assistant is also heading in this direction with deprecating valuable stuff like raspberry pi gpio support.

I don't use Apple stuff anymore either because it's too restrictive for my usecases. I use FreeBSD and ungoogled Android now.

I don't want HA to go the same way. Of course what they do is up to them but I don't think everything should necessarily be for everyone. If FreeBSD (or Linux)+KDE was for everyone for example, it would no longer be for me.

While they try to move basic config to the UI, most stuff still requires yaml in the end. So I also think they still have a long way to go to appeal to regular users. makejinja also assumes that you know some yaml…

If you try it out and face some issues, feel free to open an issue. Maybe I can do a few things to make this tool easier to use for users without a programming background.

Most? I guess it depends, I almost exclusively use YAML because I find it easier (mainly because I can copy & paste), but almost every time I could also use the UI.

UI support has vastly improved in recent versions and you are now able to get a pretty good setup without using yaml at all. Some quite interesting integrations however do still require it (e.g., trend, bayesian), so yaml is needed if you want to utilize home assistant to the max.

The things I mentioned are niches however, so I assume for the „regular“ user almost everything can now be setup via the UI.

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